


Bring Your Silver Arrows

by whatthefoucault



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Birds, Canon Disabled Character, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Food, clintkate, hawkeye squared
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 07:08:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6601567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatthefoucault/pseuds/whatthefoucault
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After that thing that happened with Kate, Clint's going through some stuff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically the same story as [The Sand and the Sea](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6388672), but where that's Kate's week, this is Clint's. So they go together, but read independently.

Okay, thought Clint, resting his forehead against the soothing cool of the grey stone floor, this looked bad.

And granted, locking oneself in Tony Stark's bathroom with like five beers was probably not the most emotionally mature way of dealing with one's most recent screw-up, but this was Kate. Katie-Kate. Girly-girl. Hawkeye. This had the potential of being a life-ruining disaster.

But it was a pool party, and they were in the pool, and there was music (and god bless Stark tech hearing aids, it actually sounded _good_ ) and there she was, looking like a ray of sunshine, and, he prayed, not quite close enough to him to have noticed the definite beginnings of a boner he had going. Please, please, please let her not have noticed the boner, he thought.

In fairness, it was impossible to tell who had kissed first. Not that it was an important distinction at this point: it happened, and it was... well, it was really something.

"Barton? Other people are going to need a place to pee," came a familiar voice somewhere beyond the fog that had rolled in around Clint's awareness.

"There's another bathroom upstairs," he shouted back, probably too loudly.

"Clint," concern had crept into the voice, which Clint was fairly sure had to be Natasha. "Do you need to throw up?"

It was then, for reasons Clint was too drunk and too stupid to determine, that he burst into a fit of uncontrollable sobs, which did have the unfortunate effect of also making him throw up.

The next thing he knew, the bathroom door was in ruins behind him, and Natasha was standing over him with her hands on her hips.

"Hey, I think it's time you called it a night," she said.

"Aww Nat, no," he said meekly, embracing the toilet bowl. "You should have left me to die."

"Oh please," she sighed, leaning down beside him. "Let's get you home."

"Careful," he said, as she hauled him to standing, leading him slowly from the room. "I barfed somewhere."

"I know, honey," she said, gingerly walking them to the car.

Clint must have nodded off for a few minutes, he thought, because the next thing he knew, they were speeding over the bridge and Natasha was stoically not yelling at him for screwing up. That was nice. 

"Where's Katie?" he slurred, but the car was moving and turning in ways too fast for his mind and his stomach to keep up with.

"Have you always been such a weepy drunk, or is this just a special occasion?" Natasha raised an eyebrow at him from the driver's seat.

"Long story," he said, "long, stupid, I'm so stupid, but she's Katie, and I'm, I'm... I'mma barf again."

"Whatever happened, I'm sure Kate's fine, and, ok, yep, I'm pulling over," she said, the car coming to a stop much too abruptly. She must have somehow opened the passenger door, thought Clint, because the next thing he knew, he was leaning over and heaving onto the sidewalk, Natasha holding him steady.

"Ugh, geez Clint, you are way too old for this shit," she said softly, helping him sit upright again. "Do you think we can walk around the corner to yours from here, or should I drive to the door?"

"Nah, 'm good," said Clint, thoroughly believing this to be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Clint flopped onto the sofa like a heavy sack of grain. Natasha placed a glass of water in his hand. He knew her well enough to know that the way she was watching him was not with anger, as many people would have assumed; rather, there was fondness at the edges of her concern.

"Did you see Katie?" he asked, staring into the glass, trying to pull the world back into focus. "Is she okay? I can't screw this up, Nat, but... I think I maybe did."

"Clint," she said carefully, "what happened?"

There was no way he was going to tell her. There was absolutely no way in hell that Clint was going to tell Natasha that he and Kate kind of made out a little in the pool and he was definitely pretty sure that she was perfect and he was an idiot for contemplating for even a moment that kissing someone as important to him as Kate could possibly be a good idea, because making out, sex, whatever, complicated things, and she made him feel like he could be such a better person just by being there and being amazing and he could not bear the thought of ever losing that because at some point, without ever meaning to, he had definitely fallen irretrievably in love with her.

And that was when Clint realised that he had definitely thought all of that out loud. Aww, brain.

"Is that what this is about?" she asked with a heavy sigh, sitting beside him. "Look, maybe give yourself some credit, yeah? You are such a good person, and you deserve to be happy. But first, I'm gonna make you drink this water, and then you're going to go straight upstairs and sleep this off and not do anything else dumb. And you're gonna take a long shower when you wake up, because you kind of smell right now."

"Shut up, _you_ smell," he retorted, gratefully gulping down his drink.

Natasha scoffed. "Get some rest, Hawkeye," she said. "And whatever happens... I'm here for you."

Clint mumbled a grateful acknowledgement, but it was very hard to stay awake, so he shuffled upstairs without a word.

>>\----->

The only reasonable explanation that Clint could think of for being awake and vaguely alert at eight in the morning was that he must have come home from the party at no later than nine in the evening. The shower was bracing, and breakfast was minimal.

He checked for missed calls, voicemails, texts, Kate... nothing. He started to tap out a message:

_~~Sorty~~ Sorry about yesterday, can we_

Scratch that, he thought, start over.

_Ok I am sorry about yesterday but also ~~Im~~ I'm in love with you so there_

DEFINITELY NOT, CLINT.

_Please don't leave_

NOPE.

_You ready to watch another Columbo after target practice tomorrow?_

Better.

His thumb was hovering over "send" when he heard the click-click-CHUNK of the door opening. Lucky perked up when Kate came in. She greeted him with ear tickles and who's-a-good-boy, and Clint sipped his coffee. Act casual, he thought. Don't make it weird.

He was about to say something, to apologise or clear the air, but she was so poised as she breezed past him into the kitchen, and he was no longer sure what it was he wanted to say.

"Clint, are you eating cereal out of a wine glass?" she asked.

"Yeah, because the coffee's in the cereal bowl," he replied, attempting to fish a few Cheerios out of the milk.

"Why... didn't you just wash a mug?"

"Because mornings," he shrugged.

It was either a hearing aid glitch, or Kate rolled her eyes so hard that Clint could hear it. She seemed significantly less worse for wear than he felt, though he found it easier to stare into his coffee and let her float around the periphery of his vision, lest he risk looking right into her perfect face and his words come out before his brain had finished thinking them.

She asked if he was okay. Aww, Katie, he thought. He hoped she was not harbouring any misplaced guilt over the thing that happened. If anyone could be said to have taken advantage - but no, he would never. Not Katie-Kate. She meant far too much to him to hurt her like that.

"Yeah, of course," he reassured her. She confirmed target practice and Columbo night was still on for tomorrow, and was gone, leaving a whisper of lilacs in her wake.


	2. Chapter 2

Whoever thought it was a good idea to hold a meeting the day after a pool party - or, for that matter, a pool party the day before a meeting - needed to be given a stern talking-to. Even a good four hours into being awake, the inside of Clint's head felt as though it were coated in corn syrup and sprinkled with rice krispies.

Nat regarded him from across the table with sympathetic fondness, and if he squinted, just a smidge of amusement. He was fairly sure Tony was giving him the stink-eye. Or he might have been flirting. Bruce was using a pen to stir his tea. Steve seemed to be actively avoiding his gaze. Sam was wearing sunglasses indoors. Some other people were probably there. The rest was blur.

And then there was Thor, with the easy smile of a ray of Midsommar sunshine. That was downright unfair.

The meeting itself was uneventful: a few new developments to be on the lookout for, but nothing urgent. Supervillainy, it seemed, was keeping a low profile that week, for which Clint was grateful. He had enough crap to put up with. Clint nodded a lot in the hope that nodding was the right thing to do to keep from drawing attention. This was due in mostly equal measure to his less-than-spectacular state of cognitive function, and also to how much of his thought processes were being drawn away by the heady siren's call of thoughts of the pool party, and Kate in her ethereal sundress, and the way she puffed out her cheeks to shoo a stray lock of hair from her face, and the scent of pool chemicals and the glint of the too-bright sun as it danced along the shifting surface of the water and the way he could just about feel the sun burrowing into his skin to build new freckles, and the way Kate smiled at him like he was a person worth smiling at like that, and the way their hands fit together, and that time they kissed. It was hardly the first time he had kissed someone against his better judgment; after all, Clint had kissed a fair few people in his time - not that he was keeping count - but that, that had been electric and comforting. It felt like belonging, or maybe it felt like finally knowing what belonging felt like.

Clint was snapped out of his musings by the scrape of chairs moving away from the table.

"Good - good meeting everybody," he said, as everyone made their way from the room.

Sam was the last to gather himself, adjusting his sunglasses as he stood.

"What the hell happened to you?" asked Clint.

"Goddamn," sighed Sam, "Jell-O shots."

"Oh no," agreed Clint.

"I mean, you've got to respect your body if you're going to go toe to toe with the kinds of people we go toe to toe with," said Sam, "but then sometimes, there's pool parties, and Jell-O shots, and you think, no big deal, I got this, and next thing you know, you're trying to drink Thor under the table, and that never ends well. Look at him."

The pair glanced over at Thor, who flashed them a friendly smile. They waved sheepishly.

"My advice?" Sam continued. "A fine Asgardian prince dares you to down every flavour of the rainbow bridge one after another? Don't you do it."

"Shit," said Clint, scrubbing at his five o'clock shadow, "how are you still alive?"

"Sheer force of will," replied Sam, holding open the door for him. "Smoothie?"

"God, yes," said Clint. He had never needed anything more in his life.

"So, what the hell happened to you?" Sam asked as they reached the kitchen.

Clint considered how best to explain, whether it was worth mentioning holing himself up in a beer-fort because he had kissed his, his... Kate, and wanted to kiss her again, repeatedly, a lot, all the time. He wanted to just keep being with her, whatever that meant.

"Man, okay, so there's this thing that happened yesterday with Kate, and - "

"You mean better Hawkeye?" asked Sam, fishing a bag of berries from the freezer.

"Yeah, that's the one," he conceded, hoping Sam would not notice what certainly felt like a doofy smile creeping into his tone. 

"Did you guys break up?" Sam cut him off.

"What? We're not... that," he replied, untwisting the blender lid with an awkward yank. "It's... complicated."

"Okay," said Sam.

"It's just that," Clint sighed, measuring a good handful of berries into the blender, "we kissed yesterday, and I don't know if it's weird now. I mean, it was hot, which is... bad?"

Sam unzipped a banana. "Okay, How drunk were you?" he asked.

"Wasn't," Clint shrugged. "Neither was she. I didn't start until after. I drank to forget."

Sam raised an eyebrow.

"Didn't work," said Clint, unceremoniously dumping in the contents of a pot of probiotic yoghurt.

"Never does," said Sam.

"She's Hawkeye and I'm Hawkeye, and that's so important to me," Clint continued. "But then when we kissed, it just seemed like the most natural thing to do in that moment, and I'm pretty sure I want to do it again. Is it even possible to be a team with somebody you're also sleeping with, and not ruin it? Because my track record? Kind of shitty."

"Listen. You love her," said Sam.

"Yeah," said Clint, without hesitation.

"And she loves you?" he asked.

"I think so?" They had both said it, repeatedly and often, but there was a difference between loving each other and love-loving each other, he thought. Maybe. Was there? Oh, who the hell knew anymore.

"And lemme just double check this," said Sam, twisting the stone out of an avocado. "You're both over 18 and you don't have any sexually transmitted diseases to disclose?"

"Uhh, yeah we are, and no we don't," replied Clint.

"Then what the hell are you doing?" Sam shouted over the grating, much too loud whizz of the blender. "Just ask her on a damn date. Come on, man. How is Rogers better at this than you are? Didn't you used to be married?"

"Once bitten, man," Clint shrugged, pouring the greyish fruity sludge into two cups.

"That doesn't seem like you," said Sam, grimacing at his first sip.

Clint thought about that a moment. "This is different," he said.

He took a sip of his smoothie. The fitness bores who somehow claimed that avocado made smoothies extra delicious could go straight to hell. They were drinking strawberry guacamole.

"Then you've gotta go for it, man, because I don't want to have to have this conversation with you again. We're not that good friends," replied Sam, heading for the door.

"Yeah, how come we don't hang out more often?" asked Clint, shuddering at a wave of unexpected brain-freeze.

"I... don't actually know you that well outside of, you know, business," said Sam.

"But we've got so much in common," reasoned Clint.

"Such as..."

"Such as... birds," he offered.

"Birds. Is that it?" Sam sighed. "Listen, I'm gonna finish this, then take a power nap, then I've got a hot date, so... good luck with all that."

"Hot date?" Clint asked.

"Friend of Steve's," Sam said with a grin. "Apparently, she is a wonderful human being."

"Sounds promising," said Clint. "Good luck."

"You too, Also-Bird-Dude," said Sam.

>>\----->

Target practice, was by no means the right time to Talk About Relationships, thought Clint. That, in his expert opinion, was a recipe for a bow twanging at the wrong moment and a trip to emergency. At the very least, the bow and arrow was something he could still be sure of: nothing flapped his focus, not even that little lock of hair that had fallen out of Kate's messy gym bun, and the way it trailed over the nape of her neck. Nope, not even that. Okay, he conceded to himself, maybe a little. The choice was obvious: either clear the air, or bury it so deep and pretend nothing ever happened. Target practice was not the time to make that choice.

"Did you save these for me?" Kate asked in the kitchen afterwards, pinging the microwave into action. "I brought them here so you'd have food. Please tell me you've eaten."

The smell of falafels wafting towards him as Kate brought the warm platter over to the sofa made Clint's stomach flutter. It might have been hunger, it might have been the sense-memory of Tony's pool party snack spread and what happened after, but whatever it was, Clint felt even more dizzy and unsettled than he had before. Stamp it down, Barton, he told himself. This is Kate, and you're not a goddamn teenager.

"I eat plenty," he protested. "...mostly pizza."

"Fine," said Kate. "Pizza's a vegetable. I can dig it. Have some falafels."

They sat in silence for the duration of the mystery: whether this was out of reverence for the late, great Peter Falk, or out of awkwardness at remembering their tongues in each other's mouths, Clint could not say. Her hand brushed against his as they both went for the last falafel: he barely suppressed the urge to take her hand in his, to explore her soft skin, and find the beginnings of the beautiful callouses that formed on people who worked with their hands. Instead, he flinched, pulling his hand away before he could do anything stupid.

"Go for it," he said.

"Such a gentleman," Kate said, chowing down.

Kate looked so comfortable, just sat beside him. He did not dare say anything to disturb that. She went home after Columbo had just one more thing to say.

Clint spent the next few days mostly napping on the sofa with Lucky. He bought groceries – including a bag of frozen blueberries for smoothies, forgetting in his enthusiasm that he did not own a functioning blender.


	3. Chapter 3

Okay, thought Clint, this looked bad. But on the other hand, how many times out of ten did a standard reconnaissance mission actually go to plan, maybe two? That was a generous estimate.

And for another thing, these were no standard goons; for one thing, normally when you shoot three stun arrows into a common henchman's chest, they stay down. They tend not to pull an arrow out of their eye without at least flinching.

So maybe, in hindsight, firing a splodie-arrow into their apparent base of operations before gathering any further intel was a bit of a misstep. If the henchmen were this powerful, there was no way this was the extent of the operation. In the moment, however, Clint was razor-focused on getting Kate (and his own sorry ass) out of there alive.  
But goddamn, did he hurt. When the blast hit, there was a flash, and a moment of blur. The sound was replaced by the persistent, high-pitched whine that told him his hearing aids were going to need adjusting, but Kate was there, in one piece. That was important.

He regretted catching the subway home as soon as they sat down. His insides hurt like a bitch. Kate held him steady, and there was something so comforting about being held by her, it was hard to mind a probably bruised rib or two. Okay, he still minded the bruised rib or two, but if these were the circumstances that allowed their renewed intimacy, as they quietly bandaged each other and she checked for broken bones, then so be it.

And thank goodness for Kate Bishop. As much as he might have liked to deny it, Clint knew on some level that he may well have gone their whole lives avoiding the topic of that time they kissed in Tony's pool, if Kate had not brought it up herself that night. Because he was really good at shooting arrows at things, but relationships, if history was anything to go by, went less well for him. And Kate was too important to lose: she was vibrant and brilliant, and he respected and loved her so much, and dammit, he just wanted to be with her. And dammit, judging by the way Kate was caressing his face, he had just said at least parts of that out loud.

So they kissed again, and this time it was with a clarity of intention that felt almost overwhelming, but also warm and normal. It felt more normal than not kissing. Then Clint felt the kind of light-headed that was likely a combination of the implicit notion that kissing was something he did with Kate now, and how nice that was, and the fact that his bruised rib made it significantly harder than usual to take anything more than shallow breaths. Kate pressed a bag of frozen blueberries into Clint's aching side, and led them to bed.

>>\----->

He was going to have to fight against his every instinct to self-defeat, he knew, but at that moment, with Kate's blurry morning face smiling at him across the pillow, unfazed by those first stripes of sunlight beaming across the bed, Clint felt pretty damn good about life.

"Morning, Hawkeye," she said, her voice softly hoarse with sleep.

"Morning, Hawkeye," he replied with a tired smile. "You sleep all right?"

"Never better," she said, rolling over and stretching her arms over her head with a heavy groan. "Shiiiiiiiiiiit, I am sore."

"I think I'm," Clint began, shifting onto his back. A dull, powerful ache overtook most of his muscles. "Nope, no, jeez, ow, no."

"Clint, promise me something," she asked, gingerly sitting up.

"Anything, girly girl," he said, and meant it.

"Next time I'm anywhere near this sore, it had better be because we've been doing literally a ton of banging," she announced.

"It would be my pleasure," he beamed. "But... maybe carefully."

"Maybe after a very long, hot shower, and breakfast," she said.

He nodded, carefully hauling himself up, legs dangling over the edge of the bed, limbs like lead jelly. How he managed to feel even worse after a good night’s post-adventure sleep was always a mystery to him.

"Do you know how hawks mate?" she asked him apropos of nothing, her dark hair tickling his face as she leaned in for a quick kiss.

"I really don't," he replied.

"They fly way up into the air, circling each other in a sort of aerial dance," she explained, hands fluttering by way of a demonstration. "Then the male dives at the female, latches onto her, and they freefall towards the ground, intertwined. Then I guess they bang each other."

Clint stared at her. "We're not trying that," he said.

"Gah, no!" she grimaced, dragging herself out of bed. "I just thought it was kind of beautiful."

"Okay," Clint agreed. "I mean, I know I'm a damn good lay, but let's not test my sexual athletics in a free fall, please."

"Yeah, I also don't lay eggs," observed Kate, shrugging one of Clint's old hoodies around her. "I mean, gross."

"I do know how humans are made, thanks," said Clint, pulling on a rumpled t-shirt from the floor.

"But you know, the other interesting thing?" she said, lingering in the bedroom doorway. "Some species of hawk mate for life. Do you want blueberry pancakes, or chocolate chip? Screw it, let's order both."

Clint smiled. Okay. This was good.


End file.
